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New Plex Plug in and Snow Leopard version on the way...

Looks like we can expect a new version of Plex soon. Read below-

September 27th, 2009 | Category: Plug-ins | Author: iordonez

We’re hard at work on both Plex/Nine and the next Plex/Eight release, which contains (among other things) a few fixes for Snow Leopard issues (no solution for the Apple Remote issue yet, unfortunately).

In the meantime, our brilliant group of plug-in developers continues to make available more and more content. Here are the latest four (and many thanks to Jay for the artwork, and to Isaac for being the release manager!).

Written by David Bartle, Funny or Die features funny videos with celebrities (including Will Ferrell), comedians, and you. Be sure to watch “The Landlord”, “Prop 8 the Musical” and “Protect Insurance Companies PSA”.

Next up, and written by Billy Joe is The Live Music Archive plug-in. This site is committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in the highest quality format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy.

For you Ruby on Rails fans, Railscasts is an very informative plugin written by lethekd. Every week Ryan Bates hosts a new Railscasts episode featuring tips and tricks with Ruby on Rails. These screencasts are short and focus on one technique so you can quickly move on to applying it to your own project. The topics target the intermediate Rails developer, but beginners and experts will get something out of it as well.

Lastly is Tête à Claques.TV by oncleben31. This plugin allows to watch videos from TAC.TV (also known as Tête à Claques.TV in French). You can watch videos in French or in English, grouped by vote or by date. For French videos you can browse them by character family too. This plugin is localized in French and English.

Ce plugin permet de lire les vidéos du site Tête à Claques.TV (connus aussi sous le nom de TAC.TV). Vous pourrez ainsi regarder les vidéos en français ou en anglais, classées par vote ou par date. Pour les vidéos en français il est possible de parcourir les vidéos regroupées par famille de personnage.
Le plugin est actuellement localisé en français et en anglais.

Almost Ready

80% Ready

Talk of Hulu going to a subscription fee based format

Its only a matter of time....

Click here for the official link

Say farewell to the free Wall Street Journal on the iPhone.

According to Paid Content, News Corp's Rupert Murdoch announced that readers of the WSJ on the Blackberry and iPhone will be charged $2 per week for the privilege of reading news through the respective apps. Online and print subscribers of the WSJ will only pay $1 a week. No time limit has been set yet, but Murdoch says it will be within the next few months.

There's bad news for Hulu lovers as well. Murdoch also said News Corp is considering either a pay-per-view or subscription model for Hulu. "No final decision has been made," Murdoch said via Webcast at an investor conference today. The WSJ itself reports that subscription offerings will roll out for media content before the end of the year, though it was made in a different context from the Hulu statement.

New TV Season upon us - Torrents Revisited

With the new Fall TV season just getting started, I thought it a good time to review and update my downloading system. If you've been following for a while, or been reading the older posts, you know I originally was using Vuze as my torrent client and TVRss.net as the subscription center for the feeds into Vuze. Well, TVRss.net went down earlier this year, and has not yet come back up. That led me to look into other options like TED (Torrent Episode Downloader) and moving over to Transmission as a client (smaller footprint in the system and less resource use the Vuze).

After using it for a couple of months over the summer, and really now much more with new shows popping up, I'm just not happy with TED. For example, last night I opened it up to see what was new and Top Chef had apparently started weeks ago, so there were 4 episodes ready for download. Of the 4 episodes, TED downloaded one, and reported torrent problems with the other 3. Not good.

All this led me back to looking for feeds. I decided to go back and really look at ShowRSS, which is an alternative to TVRss.net - which also offer RSS feeds to most popular shows. That also led me back to using Vuze, because Transmission doesn't natively offer RSS subscriptions (apparently there are work arounds, but it seemed like too much of a hassle), and Vuze had been working fine for me.

I have to say, I LOVE ShowRSS.net. I popped in Top Chef, it brought up all the episodes, and Vuze downloaded all 4 in about an hour and a half. Then I really started looking into it. Here's the thing to do, which you're gonna love.

1. Make a free account with ShowRSS.
2. Select all the shows you want to download from the drop down.
3. Under "FEEDS", leave the options as set to default - this will download the highest quality available (so if there is a 720 version and a SD version, you'll get the 720 - unless you just want to select one specific version)
4. Click "Get my Feed address"

You now have one RSS address for ALL your shows! Just go into Vuze, click the "+" sign next to Subscriptions and paste in the RSS feed you copied and Vuze will populate ALL the shows. Don't forget to check the "auto download" in the top right corner of Vuze.

I think this is so nice. You can then go back to ShowRSS and add or remove shows and not have to update Vuze.

In Vuze, under preferences, set it up so your torrents files go one place (like the downloads folder, for ex.) but all your actual avi files end up in your public shared folder, or wherever you have set up for Plex to find them. This will keep things nice and neat.

I hope this works out well for everyone, and if you have thoughts or suggestions, please post in the comments section.

UPDATE 9/13/09: Several comments have pointed out another really good quality app which you should also check out. Automatic looks like a great, low resource app which can use transmission and get shows. I think between the ShowRSS site/Vuze combo or the Automatic / Transmission combo, getting your shows this season should be a piece of cake.

(Screen shots are current shots as of today, so you can see real time results).

Offical Update on Plex & Snow Leopard

Here it is, straight from the Plex Developers...

Plex on Snow Leopard: Issues and Workarounds

September 10th, 2009 | Category: Status | Author: elan

Snow Leopard is out, and we just wanted to take a minute and update you all on how Plex runs on this great new OS. Thanks to reports from our users as well as our own testing, we’ve found that Plex seems to have four serious issues on Snow Leopard:

• Apple Remote issue: Plex is not able to gain exclusive access to the device, which causes the system to see the button presses as well. Our friend Evan looked into this and reported it to Apple as an apparent bug. Apple replied “…this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering.” One of our clever users (FortyRock) came up with a workaround, which we recommend only if you’re comfortable editing system files. It should be noted that this apparent bug affected lots of other software, such as VLC, EyeTV, Hulu Desktop, etc.
• GMA X3100 issue: There are apparently corruption/color issues on systems with this chipset (more details here). There is no known fix or workaround for this issue as of yet.
• Digital audio (AC3/DTS) issue: There is an apparent issue with Core Audio that prevents digital audio from playing more than once successfully. We’re investigating the problem, and there is a workaround by user dannyv45 that has helped some people out.
• SMB connection issue: Plex appears to have problems connecting to a Snow Leopard SMB server. We’re investigating the issue.

So the bottom line is that if you have a system that you’re using exclusively for Plex, you’re probably better off staying with Leopard, as the new OS doesn’t bring anything in the way of advantages for Plex, and it brings a good handful of serious issues.

The one question we keep getting asked is “When will a Snow Leopard compatible Plex be released?”. Unfortunately – especially given the nature of some of the issues – it’s hard to predict. In the meantime, work continues on Plex/Nine and the next maintenance release of Plex/Eight…

Backing up data

Hemmel posted a question/comment about what I'm doing for backup, and I figure it is a good time to address that.

I am a photographer by profession and I have a lot of data which I can't afford to lose.

Currently my main machine is an Intel based Mac Pro with 4 internal drives, each of them at 1TB. One of them is strictly the OS with apps and general / personal documents, personal pics, iTunes library,etc.. AND the TV shows for PLEX. Two of them are photography drives , holding only RAW files / JPGs and related client files and the 4th one is for the movies for PLEX.

Backup - I have a 1 TB external drive which I use for Time Machine to backup the OS drive.

I have a 5 bay eSata box which I use SuperDuper to backup all four of the main drives with SuperDuper. I am in the process of changing this, though. For 2 reasons. The first is that this unit is REALLY loud. Its like having a turbine engine running in your room. It is definitely something which I only turn on to back up, and otherwise it is off. This is an issue because I've noticed I lose track of doing backups and I've gone weeks without backing up, which is not good. Second reason I am changing is because I've run into several issues where the drives do not mount even though the unit is on. Actually now, I can't get them to mount at all.

Rather that continuing to mess with it, I jsut gave up and decided to go with the Drobo unit. The version 2 has firewire 800 (finally), is supposed to be nice and relatively quiet (based on reviews and youtube vids) and seems like a good all around choice with overall positive reviews.

The only thing I was hesitant about was the whole RAID thing which means that 4TB worth of drives = 2.x TB worth of drives. Before it was one to one which was nice, but really, my OS drive, even though it is 1TB, is far from full, and so on, so calculations from the Drobo calculator and adding up the current data I have revealed that the current 4TB worth of drives I have for backup will do just fine in the Drobo.

I'll be using SuperDuper to automate the backup process to the Drobo, and intent for it to stay on/go to standby so it can always be backed up.

At the end of the day, the Drobo is not cheap - $350, and neither is filling up a bunch of drives. For me, I end of having my business fund all this and write it off. But really, unless you're running lots of drives, and just have a primary drive on your main computer, or even just on the mini, let's say 1TB, you can get one external drive and use super duper, or time machine, and probably be good to go.

I know I recently had my main OS drive crash. Having come from a windows world, I was so anxious, thinking oh great, my machine is down, work is at a standstill, Time Machine won't work, etc... But that wasn't the case.

I went to Best Buy, picked up a new drive for $100. Pulled out the old one, slid in the new one, put the OS disc in, formatted the drive, then it came up that it sees Time Machine has a copy and would I like to restore. Click Yes. 3 hours later, I came back and the machine looked just like it did the night before. I didn't lose any data, and literally only required me buying a new drive, installing it, putting a disc in, and clicking "yes". This is a far cry from the pain of a friend I have who is currently going through a BSOD on a windows machine. Its been 6 days and he is still down, trying to work it out between himself and a local repair company.

If you have a good backup workflow, please post so others can see as well. Thanks!